Van Gogh experience and Jorvik Viking Center

This is our last day in York and we have some things that are on the

must do list.  We’ve been meaning to make it to Jorvik, the Viking Experience in York.  Rick Steves says it’s like Pirates of the Caribbean, but with Vikings, so Oscar should like it.  We found out when we were downtown the other day that the Van Gogh Immersion Experience is next door too, so

 those are our two things to do today.  We have good weather again and by that, I mean no rain.  Which is all I’m asking for these days.  I had read about the Van Gogh exhibit before we left on the trip, but it was in Arles and I didn’t know that it would be travelling anywhere 

else, so had put it out of mind.  We get to St. Mary’s in York and it’s pretty expensive for all of us, but Oscar wants to go and I know that John and I both want to, I just don’t know if it’s going to be worth it.  Oh, but it is.  You enter the main body of the church and they

have picked it because it works so well with the program.  The arches in the church perfectly frame the pictures that they have up, there are all of these chairs and benches set around the room for people to sit in and watch the show.  There is music, quotes from Van Gogh 

and then the paintings all over the place, coming alive and falling to the floor, climbing up the walls.  Oscar is mesmerized and takes my phone to take tons of pictures of all of the events that are happening.  After the second time through the 25 minute program, Oscar is

asking me why both daddy and I are crying….it’s kind of hard to explain, but it makes you grieve for this man who never knew that people would love his work eventually.  Of course, you can listen to the critics of things like this experience who would have

 hated this commercialization of his art, but I think there’s nothing wrong with sunflowers on a tea towel myself.  Everyone should surround themselves with things that they feel are beautiful.  But I digress….the

experience itself was wonderful and I had to marvel at the artist who put it together.  Yes, the art is Van Gogh’s, but someone put the lights, and the effects, and the changes in place.  It was masterful work and it’s like a Beatles album with George Martin in the 

booth, the perfect spin.  We move to the second room where there is the chance to color like Van Gogh, a vase that keeps changing with different still lives of his coming up and out of the vase.  John chooses to pay the 3 extra pounds for the VR experience and tells me I

have to do it too.  I wanted to do the VR experience at the King Tut exhibit because I heard it was amazing, but they wanted a ridiculous amount for it.  3 pounds feels doable and it is a really neat experience.  It’s amazing what they can do with VR now and you get to step in

to Arles and just see village life, and then what Van Gogh chose to put on canvas from the scenes.  You start off in the video thinking, “I could capture that if I could paint” and then end with knowing that you could never do what Van Gogh did because you can’t see like

he saw.  I told John that this experience felt sacred to me….doubt it will make the book though.  And Oscar was awesome for the whole thing.  He never asked when we were leaving, he had to be dragged out of the shop and we take the clerk’s recommendation for lunch and go to a bistro called Rustique.  It’s French and we’re realizing that we better start eating French and Italian food on this trip because we might not make it to France or Italy at the rate the

   virus is moving….We have great starters and John gets some amazing mussels, the only low point was my beef bourguignon.  We head to Jorvik and Oscar is already excited because there are people in Viking costumes as we enter, in the first room and then putting us on the ride.  So, it really does feel like Pirates of the Caribbean on the ride, you’re going through the Viking village of Jorvik with animatronic figures.

Now, they’re not singing a neat little pirate ditty, but they are really putting you in the village.  Not only are you going through the homes and what they made, how they lived, but they have smells in this ride.  So, you get to realize how bad York would have smelled when

there was no sanitation, blacksmiths, coopers, dyers, and all the other parts of a town like this.  Oscar keeps asking why it stinks and we’re trying to explain that it would have stank in the day.  We get to see the Viking age artifacts that they uncovered in Coppergate

area of York and Oscar gets to have a Viking coin struck for him.  With that, we leave the stinky Viking period and middle ages and head back out to walk around York.  It’s been a really good stay in York and we have had the perfect weather for everything we 

    needed.  We’ve enjoyed it here and I get to get a few more great photos of the ruined abbey, the Roman multiangular tower, museum gardens.  We have a lot of packing to do and it’s a good thing we’re on a train and not a plane because we have way too much stuff….